Theater cancels Beauty and the Beast due to LGBTQ character

With the premiere of Beauty and the Beast approaching, here is one aspect that made a theater in the United Sates cancel its screening: the live-action will feature an intriguing character depicted as LGBTQ. But a theater in Alabama cancelled the screening because of this character.

Beauty and the Beast will premiere in mid-March.

A drive-in theater in Alabama, the Henagar Drive-In Theatre in DeKalb County, has cancelled the screening of the newest retelling of the fantasy Beauty and the Beast, due to the existence of a character who was described openly as gay. The news was first reported by Variety.

“It is with great sorrow that I have to tell our customers that we will not be showing Beauty and the Beast at the Henagar Drive-In when it comes out”, the company’s Facebook post read.

Director Bill Condon was telling Attitude, a few days ago, that Gaston’s friend LeFou is breaking the ice as the LGBTQ character in the movie history ever! “LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston”, Condon said, adding that “tt may have been a long time coming but this is a watershed moment for Disney.”

LeFou in the animated movie

Chief film critic for Variety, Owen Gleiberman does not agree that LeFou is acting gay. In his review, he writes: “Josh Gad, incidentally, plays Gaston’s worshipful stooge Le Fou as maximally silly and fawning, but I must have missed the memo where that spells “gay.”

LeFou in the 2017 live-action

The Alabama drive-in theater seems to have had a problem with the depiction of the character and they took measures: “When companies continually force their views on us, we need to take a stand”, a post on the theater’s Facebook page read. If I can’t sit through a movie with God or Jesus sitting by me, then we have no business showing it.”

The Henagar Drive-In added that the community there is mostly Christian and that people are not willing to compromise the teaching they receive from the Bible. Even though others might see their choice as extreme, they will continue to screen only family-oriented movies that do not include “sex, nudity, homosexuality, and foul language.”